Taiwan: The Other China

I shudder for a moment, half expecting to see the ghosts of Chiang Kai-shek and his elegant wife, Madame Soong Mei-ling, walking down the corridor. I am checking in to Taipei's Grand Hotel, the opulent, palacelike structure built by the Generalissimo just a few years after he and his Nationalist army fled to Taiwan in 1949 to escape the Chinese Communists. Frosted-glass Chinese lanterns with red tassels hang from the elaborately painted ceilings, and the floor is covered with a huge regal red carpet. Twenty-foot-tall carved wooden doorways line the hallways. The place has a grandiosity about it; even the well-trained reception clerk, efficient but chilly in her chic Chinese suit, gives off an air of self-importance. I am reminded of my time here as a student, exactly thirty years ago.

The Grand Hotel is a wonderful homage to that era, when Taiwan—officially called the Republic of China—still harbored delusions that it might regain power over all of China. Chiang Kai-shek's authoritarian Nationalist party had, after all, ruled China since 1911, and was a close ally of the United States, which took its side in the civil war with Mao Zedong's Communists. But Chiang's notoriously corrupt government lost the war, and when his two-million-strong army arrived on Taiwan, a hundred miles off the coast of mainland China, he declared martial law, with plans to go home one day. Thirty years later, in 1978, we students were not allowed to have dance parties. We heard whispers of knocks on people's doors at night and of anti-government protesters being dragged off to jail. Around Taipei, huge propaganda billboards exhorted citizens to retake the mainland, as if China's civil war were still under way. It was a confusing time: As an idealistic student, I viewed the Nationalist government as Fascist and corrupt, as opposed to what I imagined as a sort of utopia in Communist China.

But Taiwan today is a flourishing democracy, and I have returned to search my memories, to explore how the island has changed over three decades, and to see how it stacks up to the other China. Beijing still considers Taiwan a renegade province, and so what happens here, politically, culturally, and economically, matters to the mainland. The atmosphere, however, is changing. Taiwan has just elected a new president, Ma Ying-jeou, a Harvard Law graduate who—after eight years of a president who advocated de jure independence from China (enraging Beijing)—is back to talking about both sides being part of "one China," a formula that both Beijing and Taipei can agree upon. Just a month after taking office, he announced that mainlanders—once labeled "Communist bandits"—would be allowed to travel to Taiwan as tourists. There is again a sense of destiny in Taiwan—that maybe, just maybe, it can one day serve as a model for all of China. "What do you think each of those tourists is going to bring home with him to the provinces of China?" says Lin Chong-pin, one of Taiwan's experts on relations between the island and mainland China. "Freedom and democracy."

On the surface, Taiwan may not look like a model for much of anything. To be sure, like all modern Asian capitals, it has plenty of chichi discos, Starbucks, and shopping malls. This is also the home of what was briefly the world's tallest building, Taipei 101, whose elevator flies, disconcertingly, up to the eighty-ninth floor in forty seconds. Taipei's best Taiwanese restaurant, Shin Yeh, is on the eighty-fifth floor, and there you can eat shark's fin soup, braised abalone, and oyster omelets while looking out on the twinkling lights of the low-lying city. But unlike on the mainland, where the world's great architects are building wildly creative towers, and in some cases, entire new cities, the growth in Taipei has been organic, steady, and dull.

As a result, the capital is a scrappy-looking gray city that reveals its soul only in the tree-lined back lanes. There, children hang out with their grandparents in small neighborhood parks, where people practice tai chi at dawn and middle-aged ladies do their afternoon exercises. Middle-class residential life—the average income in Taiwan is more than sixteen thousand dollars a year, compared with less than three thousand dollars on the mainland—mixes with chic boutiques and simple dumpling shops, cheek by jowl with Japanese sushi restaurants, 7-Elevens, and eateries specializing in the myriad regional cuisines of China.

The first stop on anybody's visit to Taiwan is usually the National Palace Museum. And so one sunny spring morning, I head to the museum in the hilly green outskirts of Taipei. The late Generalissimo was no fool: When his army fled, they took with them from the Forbidden City three thousand crates of China's most important imperial treasures—almost one-third of the entire palace collection, including the most exquisite pieces, carefully chosen by China's top scholars. In an epic long march, dodging Japanese artillery fire and bombs along the way, the army moved the collection from Beijing, first to Nanjing, then to the wartime capital in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, and eventually to Taiwan.

The museum used to be dark and dusty, with poorly lit scrolls of ink-and-brush mountain scenes and calligraphy hanging in the gloom. There were no guides and little explanation of the exhibits, and it had a stifling feel of oppression about it—a perfect reflection of the politics of the time. Sure enough, in keeping with the island's new democratic spirit, the museum has been renovated and now has interactive displays and good lighting. Last year, it held a historic exhibit of Song dynasty works that attracted Chinese art aficionados from London, New York, and Hong Kong.

Only a few minor Song ink-and-brush scrolls are on display on the day I visit. For preservation reasons, the ancient paintings are shown for no more than three months at a time and then go back into storage for at least three years. But there are plenty of other objects on view, including delicate blue-and-white Ming porcelain vases, eggshell-thin Song celadon bowls and cups, and two-thousand-year-old Han dynasty bronze vessels with detailed engravings, all presented with clear English and Chinese descriptions. Boisterous Taiwanese schoolchildren and a couple of Japanese tour groups crowd around the museum's pride and joy, a large piece of polished multicolored jade ingeniously carved to look like a cabbage, with a locust and a cricket hiding near the top.

"Oh, it is Taiwan you must come to for the treasures," says Judy Chan, my guide, who speaks excellent English and is dressed in a demure, Chinese-style qipao dress, her hair tucked into a neat bun. In recent years, she has visited the real palace, the Forbidden City in Beijing, but was underwhelmed. "You go to Beijing to see the buildings, but they have nothing inside. We can't compare with all of mainland China in terms of quantity of old pieces, but this is where you will find the very best imperial work."

Chou Kung-shin, the National Palace Museum's poised new director, tells me that she is now advising experts from the mainland on curatorship and museum management. The daughter of a mainland China–born doctor, she studied French in Taiwan, then went to Paris and got her Ph.D. in art history at the Sorbonne. Wearing a silk high-necked Chinese dress clasped at the throat with a brooch, Chou tells me how the museum has blossomed over the last decade, along with democracy. "It's not enough to just think about conservation," she says, slipping easily between Chinese and En-glish. "You have to consider your audience." Chou has transformed the once unwelcoming museum with an array of educational programs and extended weekend hours. She is hoping to set up a center for incubating young local designers.

Although Beijing and Taipei aren't officially on speaking terms, on an unofficial level there have been many exchanges over the past fifteen or so years. A decade ago, mainland experts told Chou that they were depressed at having lost a decade during the Cultural Revolution, leaving a huge gap in their knowledge. "I said, 'No problem—we can help fill in the gap,' " she remembers. "We know Chinese culture, and we know the world. My aim is that we can be a model for all of China."

As the world rushes to do business with Beijing, that may be hard to imagine. And yet in many ways, the island embodies the best of China—a place where ancient traditions coexist with freewheeling thinking and free elections. After all, in a country that counts its culture as five thousand years old, six decades of Communist rule is hardly the final chapter, and Taiwan democracy has added a dynamic new plotline to the cross-strait Chinese rivalry. A trip to Taiwan provides not only a hint of what China might have been if the Nationalists had won the war but a glimpse of where—with a lot of luck—China may one day be going. The island's development—and particularly its transition to a modern democracy—is the untold other side of China's story.

A controversial claim made by many Asian food cognoscenti: Taipei's Chinese food is arguably the best in the world. Hong Kong may have the world's most delicate Cantonese dim sum, and Beijing may serve the most succulent Peking duck (though that's debatable). But in Taipei, restaurants serving food from different provinces—from the simplicity of Hangzhou-style sautéed shrimp to the earthiness of Beijing pulled noodles and spicy Szechuan orange-peel beef—stand side by side. Locals, of course, believe that the ingredients used in Taiwan's restaurants are of a higher quality than you'll find anywhere else in the world. Whether or not that's true, it's virtually impossible to have a bad meal in Taipei. Chiang brought with him the best chefs from all over China, and those mainlanders who joined him wanted to eat authentic dishes from their hometowns.

Yang Bingyi, the 81-year-old owner of Dintaifung, Taiwan's most popular dumpling restaurant, is one of them. As Shanghai-style xiaolong bao and shrimp-and-pork dumplings arrive, Yang, bushy white eyebrows waggling, tells me how he arrived from northern Shaanxi Province after the war as a young soldier with no education and nothing to his name. He worked for a Taiwanese oil trader for a couple of years, then set up a dumpling shop. I had long dreamed about the dumplings I used to eat after Chinese class on Taipei's East Peace Road. They cost a dollar for twenty, and dipped in Szechuan hot sauce, soy sauce, and strips of ginger, were the best thing I ever ate. Yang's restaurant, a simple joint with linoleum tables and hour-long lines of customers waiting on the street outside for tables, does my memories justice. His son, Warren, is expanding, with branches already in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and fifteen in mainland China; all have been instant hits. He tells me that the franchises in China are the toughest to manage: "They just don't work as hard," he says.

Yang isn't alone in his move. Taiwan is one of the largest investors in the mainland, with as much as $10 billion in direct and indirect investments in 2007. High-tech companies from Apple to Sony subcontract to Taiwanese firms, which in turn manufacture everything from iPods to GPS systems in thousands of factories along China's booming coast. So many factories have moved to China, in fact, that Taiwan—like the United States—is worried about rising unemployment and a hollowing out of its economy. "To stay ahead, Taiwan has to go into services and develop its own brands," Stan Shih, who founded Taiwan's most famous computer brand, Acer, tells me later that day. Since his semi-retirement a few years ago, Shih has traveled around Taiwan and concluded that there's a huge opportunity to develop high-end tourism. He thinks Taiwan's biggest selling points are nature (the mountains and hot springs) and its unpackaged traditional culture.

So after my dumpling fest, I decide to get out of town, see some of the surroundings, and seek some traditional spiritual edification at the Dharma Drum Monastery, one of Taiwan's best-known Buddhist institutions. During my student travels long ago, I was dazzled by Taiwan's wild Taoist festivals, with shamans in trances and thousands of villagers carrying temple gods through the streets, whipped violently back and forth by the spirits that presumably possessed them. Taiwan's temples are generally ornate, elaborately carved with fluorescent-colored dragons, lucky fish, and Taoist sages. I once spent the night at a Buddhist monastery, where I was consumed by the mysticism, which was heightened by the thick incense smoke billowing from the temple's entrance.

My taxi starts climbing a small mountain to Dharma Drum, an hour from Taipei, near the northern coast, and I wonder if we might have made a wrong turn: a large, sleek building emerges from the mist. The monastery, built only three years ago, has no colorful filigree. Its simple, elegant lines and bronze, granite, and cherrywood are more refined Amanresorts than Chinatown kitsch. Sherry Lin, a former accountant who gave up her career to study Buddhism, welcomes me and gives me a tour: displays of Buddhist relics, a wishing tree where I hang some paper messages for my children, and the Grand Buddha Hall, where daily chanting sessions occur.

We take a short hike around the grounds. Tiny insects are swarming, dropping to the ground as they lose their wings, signaling that it's about to rain. There must be some Buddhist message in their final flurry before death, but I can't think what it might be. Lin leads me to the temple's terrace, overlooking a lush valley and a roaring brook. We sit cross-legged, and another novice tells me to close my eyes. "Your eyelids—relaaaax. Your shoulders—relaaaax." In a singsong tone, she instructs me to empty my brain. A gentle breeze brushes my face, and I feel tension slipping from my shoulder blades. Fat raindrops start to fall, cool on my forehead. When the torrent finally begins, we go inside.

We pass handsome young nuns and monks in gray robes, who greet us with big smiles and "Amitofo," a Buddhist blessing. We watch a short film on Dharma Drum University, which is being built on the grounds. "Our university will teach Buddhist education with a global and broad-minded perspective," the narrator says. Supper is a simple mix of vegetables, rice, and steamed buns, which we serve ourselves in stainless steel bowls with stainless chopsticks. We eat in silence, except for the clicking of chopsticks, women on one side of the dining hall, men on the other. I am shown to my spartan but comfortable room, and drift into dreams to the sound of cicadas outside my window.

It's still dark when the knock at the door comes, and I pull on my clothes for the morning chanting session. Monks in brown robes are in perfect formation on one side of the spare, vaulted room, and students, their heads not yet shaven, in black robes on the other. Round brownish-red cushions are lined up in front of each worshipper; if I look at them on a diagonal, there are perfect rows of red polka dots both horizontally and on an angle, like a gigantic game of Go. The monks chant in a droning monotone, facing three large statues of Buddha. When they are done, they file out.

There is nothing like this in mainland China, where religion is permitted once again but is treated by the Communist party as either a vague threat or a folk superstition. And it certainly wouldn't be possible for a traveler to spend time like this in a temple—not without official scrutiny. Walking down a corridor, I see through a doorway rows of young monks sitting at computers. "They are studying e-sutras," Lin says. The monastery is also bringing Buddhism into the modern age with a number of civic projects. She tells me that the afternoon chanting session will be dedicated to the victims of the earthquake in Sichuan; the temple just delivered water purifiers to the cyclone victims in Myanmar. A few months ago, Dharma Drum held a forum in which the abbot led businesspeople and academics in a discussion about the role of religion in civil society.

Only slightly guilt-stricken, I head for a more hedonistic destination, Taiwan's most luxurious hot spring resort, Villa 32, in Bei-tou, just half an hour by taxi from Taipei. Hot springs are an extremely popular recreation in Taiwan, in part because of the island's exotic geological formations and in part because it was colonized for fifty years by the Japanese. Japan claimed Taiwan after winning the first Sino-Japanese war in 1894, and ruled until 1945, when it surrendered at the end of World War II, turning the island over to Chiang's Republic of China. During their reign, the Japanese promoted Japanification of the island's residents, and to this day, many old people still speak Japanese. And the Taiwanese love their hot springs. There are public hot springs and private resorts all over the island, many in Beitou.

The hotel, all linear wood and stone, has only five duplex suites, decorated with neutral colors, modern furniture, and flat-screen TVs. In the spa, I don a white robe, and a smiling, white-uniformed attendant escorts me to a shower and then to the hot spring. There are four indoor black-slate pools, each with waters from different springs. I stand awkwardly in my robe for a few minutes, then realize that the other Chinese women are walking around stark naked, completely unabashed. I take the plunge into the Azure Pool, steaming and restorative. I can see why the Japanese loved this place so much. I think, Now I have reached nirvana.

The next day, I fly to Hualien, a town known for its marble and for Taiwan's most famous natural wonder, Taroko Gorge. Towering, narrow cliffs formed by violent tectonic shifts four million years ago loom over a rushing, iridescent turquoise river. My guide, Cheng Pei-chen, a fifty-year-old former judge who decided to give up the stress and live a simple life in the outdoors, shows me around the information center, which has an environmental exhibit that explains the geological history of the site and underscores the importance of protecting nature. Cheng tells me that environmental education campaigns have raised people's awareness over the past decade; littering is no longer a big problem in Taroko.

We hike the path carved into the rock along the river's edge and talk about the mainland Chinese tourists who will soon be swarming to spots like this, now that President Ma has relaxed the travel ban. The business will be great for the local hotels, of course, but owners and the park rangers worry that the mainlanders, less sophisticated than Taiwanese travelers, might trash the area. I clamber onto a rock in the middle of the stream. Rolling up my jeans, I stick my feet into the icy cold water and see some small fish wiggling by. It's a steamy day, and I threaten to take off my clothes and jump in—which would be breaking the law. "Okay, but if you do, I don't know you!" Cheng replies with a laugh. A few other Taiwanese tourists climb out too, pose for a picture, then disappear. All I can hear is the hum of the cicadas and the roar of the rushing water. The wall of marble rising above me is striated black, brown, and white, representing millions of years of shifting rock. I close my eyes and feel tiny. I remember my meditation teacher's soft voice: "Eyelids, relaaaax."

On the way back to the park's gate, we stop to photograph a memorial hall commemorating the soldiers who died building the road through the mountains and bump into a busload of tourists from Hunan Province, on the mainland—mid-level provincial bureaucrats who probably got permission to come under some sort of "scholarly" exchange. I recognize them from their high-waisted pants and crew cuts. Each is holding a video camera, filming the scenery. I ask them what they think of Taiwan. "It's okay, but nothing compared to the mainland," one man responds, smoking a cigarette through tobacco-stained teeth. How sad, I think. "Aiyah, those mainlanders are so snobby!" my driver says as we head back to the car.

Refined is the word that cross-strait expert Lin Chong-pin uses to describe what distinguishes Taiwan from the mainland, and I am beginning to understand what he means. Sipping from a covered Chinese tea cup in an office that looks out over the sprawl of Taipei, Lin, an elegant man in a gray safari suit, talks grand geopolitical strategy. He is one of Taiwan's tacticians, and listening to him, I feel like I am witness to epic, historic processes. "We in Taiwan are looking for peaceful evolution on the mainland," Lin says. "I am optimistic. We think we can influence China."

Sixty years ago, Chiang brought with him China's best and brightest—those who could get out, anyway—from internationally trained diplomats, to the Western-educated (Madame Chiang graduated from Wellesley), to art historians and scientists. For forty years, they controlled politics and business at the expense of the Taiwanese. From his demeanor, I can tell Lin is a descendant of that elite class, and so I ask about his background. His father, it turns out, was an adviser to Claire Lee Chennault, the American general who founded the Flying Tigers, the U.S.-trained air corps that helped defend China against the Japanese.

There is an easygoing sophistication about Taiwanese people, stemming from the high standard of living, the emphasis on education, and the fact that they are worldly travelers. The Generalissimo's son, Chiang Ching-kuo, lifted martial law in 1987, and shortly thereafter Taiwanese were permitted to travel. They learned about other cultures, shopped like mad at duty-free stores, and developed a comfort level about their role in the world. At the same time, parents and schools emphasized traditional Confucian values, focusing on respect for elders, the family, the importance of self-cultivation, and decorum. Taiwanese society is less commercial than mainland China's, which is on a frenzied consumption binge. Reading is big: On Taipei's clean new subway system, commuters read books and newspapers. A local bookstore chain, Eslite, is always packed with browsers and readers—the flagship even stays open twenty-four hours a day.

Taiwan's political opening has been dramatic. In 1995, the government apologized for a long-hidden bloody crackdown in 1947 on indigenous Taiwanese demonstrators who had been protesting the corrupt new Chinese government. History was made again when the opposition Democratic progressive party won the presidency in 2000. The Nationalist party's Ma won back the presidency a few months ago.

Democracy and openness have seeped into every aspect of Taiwan's culture, from museum curatorship to religion and parks management—even, I discover, architectural restoration.

Lukang, on the west coast, is home to one of Taiwan's oldest temples. A son of Lukang, computer tycoon Shih has told me that his hometown retains many ancient traditions, from earthy local opera, performed in front of the central temple, to traditional paper lantern making, so I fly down to have a look. Lukang has a rich history: It was the landing spot for Dutch traders running the spice trade in the seventeenth century. They ruled Taiwan for thirty-eight years but were eventually overthrown by Ming dynasty general Koxinga, who sailed over from the mainland. The town has preserved its ancient district. Tourists can ride in pedicabs through the old section, where rows of Qing dynasty homes have been restored, with doors painted bright blue or red.

If Dharma Drum reflects the sophistication of Taiwan's modern Buddhism, Lukang's Longshan Temple shows how popular traditional Taoism, unchanged for centuries, remains among Taiwan's common folk. Old men in undershirts and baggy pants gather on benches near the entrance to gossip, as young and old alike light incense and bow to the Taoist gods. Several years ago, the local government launched a restoration project with some seven million dollars donated by a local company that had made its fortune manufacturing shoes for Nike and others in mainland China. Then the debates began. How much to restore? Should the faded columns, blackened by incense smoke, be repainted? The restorers decided to err on the side of caution: The magnificent temple still has columns and doors blackened by centuries of incense burning, and beautiful, faded paintings have not been touched up. "On the mainland, some boss would just decide to restore, and it would be done; it's all about power. If they want to build a road, it's easy—no matter how many people have to be moved, it just gets done," says Wang Kang-show, secretary of the restoration committee. "But here, we must discuss first. This is democracy!"

At the new ultramodern high-speed railway station, on my way back to Taipei, orange-suited young people guide travelers to the right gates. As I wait to buy my ticket, I almost trip over a uniformed woman who is on her knees, scraping a piece of chewing gum off the gray stone floor with a special tool. A little boy in front of me is staring at my blond hair. I say something to him in Chinese, and he hides his face, overcome by shyness. His young middle-class mother turns around and speaks sharply to her son: "It's not polite to turn away like that. You must look someone in the face when they speak to you!" She smiles at me.

Back in Taipei, I head to the office of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, to see choreographer Lin Hwai-min, the creative genius who is Taiwan's national treasure, and talk about mainland and Taiwanese culture. He and I have a connection because when I first came to the island as a language student, I shared a flat with one of his original dancers, Lo Man-fei. Back then, she was teaching dance classes to kids, but she later became a star and a choreographer in her own right. Two years ago, my friend died of cancer, and I never got to say good-bye to her. Choked up, Lin shows me photos of Lo dancing that hang in his office and gives me a DVD of one of her solo pieces.

With a hug, Lin tells me that I must go to a restaurant called Shi Yang Shan Fang for dinner, to get a sense of Taiwan's refinement. Winding up the hillside surrounding Taipei, my driver and I both think we must have the wrong address: Villas that were diplomatic residences before the ambassadors all moved to Beijing—only twenty-three countries still officially recognize Taiwan—give way to a few little villages and, eventually, to tall grass and a forest. The air is chilly. Finally, in the dark, we arrive at a gate, and a young man in black leads me down a stone path toward a building where I can hear muffled laughter.

I enter and see a shoe rack, so I take off my shoes. Around the corner is an elegant scroll table with a single orchid arching over a book of Chinese ink-and-brush paintings. A woman appears and guides me to my table, separated from the next room by a semi-transparent screen. Young waiters serve me a twelve-course set meal of tiny, elegant dishes and odd combinations—a scallop and poached egg; a bite-size mushroom on a clump of rice, topped with a fine sliver of salami; a teacup of peanut curd and potato—that are Japanese in presentation, part Chinese and part nouvelle in flavor. It may well have been the most delicate and exquisite dinner I've ever had.

On my final day in Taipei, I have come to the massive, imperial-style Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, built to honor the late Generalissimo. A high-pitched shriek, followed by a sawing, rhythmic screeching, pierces the quiet of the elegant compound's manicured Chinese garden with its pond stocked with carp. The squawking sound draws me, and so I defer my encounter with the dictator and veer toward the long covered corridor that follows the compound wall.

Under the eaves, I come upon a white-haired lady in red cloth shoes and gray trousers singing a high-pitched aria from a Peking opera—a stylized, northern Chinese theater form usually staged with neon-painted faces, bright silk robes, and exotic, towering hats. But this is the stripped-down, no-makeup, no-costumes version, performed by elderly people trying to keep alive distant memories of home. Sitting on a bench nearby, an old man is playing the erhu, the two-stringed Chinese violin. Another old man taps his foot and clacks a wooden percussion instrument in the shape of a round fish. A lone spectator, a rail-thin white-haired man, listens attentively, occasionally shouting "Hao!" ("Good!").

I stand and listen for a while, then strike up a conversation. His name is Luo Chih-hua, and he was born in 1923, far, far away in China's Hubei Province. His family was so poor that he left home at fifteen to seek his fortune and ended up joining the Nationalist army to fight the Japanese. But when Chiang's Nationalists lost the civil war that ensued, at the age of twenty-five, Luo ended up in a foreign land called Taiwan.

For decades, the cold war between Beijing and Taipei made it impossible to travel back to the mainland to see his family. Luo worked as a low-level spy, intercepting Communist Chinese radio reports; he built a new life, married a Taiwanese woman. Finally, forty years later, as Taiwan became more free, Luo was able to go home and visit his mother, by then ninety-five. "We cried and cried," he says. I mention the Chinese proverb "Falling leaves return to their roots," suggesting that he might want to go home. "Of course I'm homesick, but my life is here now," he says. "Plus, they are not so free or democratic on the mainland. We have freedom here."